Oscar Casares
Se Habla Español
As a third-generation Mexican American raised in Texas, it’s only natural that I speak better English than I do Spanish. Try telling that to a radio audience of one million Latinos.
I “FOUND MY VOICE,” as they say, in 2003. Actually, it was an editor who found it and published my first book, a collection of stories set along the border in South Texas, but I was the one who traveled across the country for the different promotional events, including readings and media interviews. And although the book was published in English, a few of the interviews were in Spanish, including one I did on El Cucuy de la Tarde, the highest-rated radio program in L.A.
“El Cucuy de la Tarde” translates literally to “The Bogeyman of the Afternoon.” Spanish-speaking moms everywhere are famous for telling their kids to go to sleep or el cucuy will get them. The man who assumed the moniker is a 51-year-old Honduran named Renán Almendárez Coello. El Cucuy, the radio personality, is a cross somewhere between Howard Stern and Oprah, if you can imagine a universe where such cross-fertilization would be possible. His shows are filled with crude jokes and a vast array of sound effects, most of them laugh tracks. He’s also well known for giving advice to listeners and for supporting various humanitarian causes.
I wasn’t fooling myself; I knew a few casual interviews were not the same as a nationally syndicated live radio show. My Spanish was acceptable but certainly not what you’d call polished. And if I’d learned anything speaking the language, it was that no one was more unforgiving of a slipup than another Spanish-speaking person, of which there would be an audience of one million listening to me talk about my book.
The expectation from many Latinos is that I should speak Spanish perfectly, while Anglos expect my English to be just as perfect. There’s a scene in the movie Selena where the father, played by Edward James Olmos, explains to Selena, played by Jennifer Lopez, how difficult it is to satisfy both groups and to have any freedom from these expectations because their homeland is not across an ocean but just on the other side of the Rio Grande. He goes on to tell her that they have to prove how Mexican they are to the Mexicans and how American they are to the Americans, both at the same time. In his own prophetic words, “Man, nobody knows how tough it is being a Mexican American!”
My personal history with the Spanish language started several years before I was even born. It seems my older brother showed up for his first day at St. Joseph’s School, in Brownsville, not knowing a word of English. That afternoon a pair of nuns knocked on my mother’s front door. At the time, in 1945, it wasn’t uncommon along the border for Spanish to be a child’s first language, whether he was Mexican American or Anglo. These Irish nuns weren’t so understanding, though. They were upset that my brother couldn’t understand them. Worse still, my mother was speaking perfectly fine English.
“And why, may I ask, have you not taught your child to speak English?” one of the sisters inquired.
My mother confessed that she had erred in speaking only Spanish in the house, not foreseeing that her son would need to learn English before starting school. She promised that from then on she and my father would speak more English at home. The nuns left a few minutes later, confident in their latest conversion.
By the time I came along, several years later, things had changed. Between themselves, my parents continued to speak only in Spanish, but with me they spoke mainly in English. If they said something to me in Spanish, I answered in English. I understood what they were saying, but I couldn’t answer them with more than a few words of my broken Spanish.
Later I discovered that I wasn’t alone. There were generations of us speaking what’s sometimes labeled “kitchen Spanish,” and many of us speaking even less. The reason for this is a lesson in Texas history. As far back as 1918, state laws had institutionalized a “no Spanish” rule in the educational system. Our parents and grandparents were either punished in the classroom or beaten up on the playground for speaking their “native” language. Whether coerced by legions of nuns or persuaded by the possibility of advancing their children’s futures, parents began speaking more and more English, to the exclusion of Spanish.
Of course, no one lives in Brownsville without learning some Spanish. Eventually you’re going to pull up to the drive-through at the McDonald’s and want to make sure the girl knows you don’t want onions—¡sin cebollas! Eventually you’re going to shop downtown and realize that English is, in fact, a second language. Eventually you’re going to cross the bridge to Matamoros and understand that not everyone speaks inglés, amigo. Eventually you’re going to be cut off in traffic by someone from Mexico and, in the moment, realize you’ve run out of words to properly express your feelings.
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